Autumn Photography
It is my intention to post quarterly reviews of shots taken during the last season. This is the first; this is Autumn 2017.
Technically autumn is defined as the period between the September equinox and the Winter equinox (21/22 Dec.) However, for convenience I’m going to conduct my quarterly reviews at the start of December, March, June and September. So I define: Autumn as September to November; Winter as December to February; Spring as March to May, Summer as June to August. Currently, I’m feeling a little bit smug about this determination given the weather experienced on the 10th, see my Journal for that day.
The photographer I have most been influenced by during this period is Paul Mitchell. Particularly with regard to his Woodland photography taken at Burnham Beeches and Stoke Common. Fortunately, both these locations are very close to me. Doubly fortunately, I was able to attend a full day workshop by Paul at the Thames Valley branch of the Royal Photographic Society’s Digital Imaging Group, where he spent a morning talking about how he creates his images. Included in this was a working demonstration of his post-processing workflow in Lightroom and Photoshop.
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Capturing the Mood of the Season
Word association: Autumn = mist, leaf drop, golden colours, woodland walks.
Colours I think are key. I have experimented, as explained further below, with reducing the colour palette to highlight the seasonal colours of golden orange.
Some of these images were entered into competition. “Trees in Mist at Stoke Park”, personally my favourite, did not do so well, scoring 18 in the Open category on 21 November 2017; whereas “First Reflection” collected a 20 in the “Sunrise/ Sunset” competition on the 12 December 2017.
Top Images
Burnham Beeches
Photographic Techniques Used
The main objective was limiting the colour palette to achieve an autumn feel. Whether or not Paul Mitchell explicitly manipulates the colour tones of his images is unknown, but what is clear is that he achieves strong colour themes, which is one of the aspects that makes his images so appealing.
See my manipulation of images from Cliveden on 11 December 2017 of the three shots above. These use an analogous colour theme of Orange, Yellow and Green; implemented using the Colour Toning tool in Lightroom CC Classic.
See also my Colour Theory First Learnings post.
I have also taken to using a subtle vignette, sometimes of no more than 10 points, to hold the eye in the image. Compositionally this seems to work quite well for autumn landscapes. The stronger vignette in the Cliveden images was achieved in Photoshop with a copied layer, the blend mode set to Multiply, and the middle masked out so that only the corners are affected by the darkening effect of the Multiply blend mode.
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